Petitions

again, and then they may stick to that road all day, but every minute there’s the possibility of a change. Of course all the roads join up near the village, but by that time all the carriages are racing like mad, while nearer the Castle the pace isn’t quite so fast. And the amount of traffic varies just as widely and incomprehensibly as the choice of roads. There are often days when there’s not a carriage to be seen, and others when they travel in crowds. Now, just think of all that in relation to father. In his best suit, which soon becomes his only suit, off he goes every morning from the house with our best wishes. He takes with him a small Fire Brigade badge, which he has really no business to keep, to stick in his coat once he’s out of the village, for in the village itself he’s afraid to let it be seen, although it’s so small that it can hardly be seen two paces away, but father insists that it’s just the thing to draw a passing official’s attention. Not far from the Castle entrance there’s a market garden, belonging to a man called Bertuch who sells vegetables to the Castle, and there on the narrow stone ledge at the foot of the garden fence father took up his post. Bertuch made no objection because he used to be very friendly with father and had been one of his most faithful customers⁠—you see, he has a lame foot, and he thought that nobody but father could make him a boot to fit it. Well, there sat father day after day, it was a wet and stormy autumn, but the weather meant nothing to him. In the morning at his regular hour he had his hand on the latch and waved us goodbye, in the evening he came back soaked to the skin, every day, it seemed, a little more bent, and flung himself down in a corner. At first he used to tell us all his little adventures, such as how Bertuch for sympathy and old friendship’s sake had thrown him a blanket over the fence, or that in one of the passing carriages he thought he had recognised this or the other official, or that this or the other coachman had recognised him again and playfully flicked him with his whip. But later he stopped telling us these things, evidently he had given up all hope of ever achieving anything there, and looked on it only as his duty, his dreary job, to go there and spend the whole day. That was when his rheumatic pains began, winter